Brandy Foster (email: brandy.foster@wright.edu)
is a neo-Janeite and cultural studies enthusiast from Wright State
University. Her Jane Austen is sassy, fun, and brilliant.
Her Mr. Darcy belongs exclusively to her.

The
word “pimp” has evolved so that currently it not only
signifies its historical connection to prostitution but also serves
as popular culture vernacular for customization: MTV, for
example, airs a show entitled Pimp My Ride, which features the
radical customization of cars. Indeed, a fetish with
customization seems to have permeated consumer culture, ranging from
the popularity of custom-built homes to Burger King’s “Have
It Your Way,” from customizable computer desktops and
cell-phone ring tones to highly stylized scrapbooks, from the rage
for personalized videogame characters to the proliferation of
customized tattoos. The extensive list of popular fiction based
on Jane Austen’s life, novels, characters, and even her readers
suggests that Austen has been pimped by the many authors who
have commodified her name and customized both Austen’s body of
work and her biography to accommodate niche markets. By
customizing Austen to their vision of the author and her texts, these
readers-turned-writers strive to fill in gaps in Austen’s
biography and plots.

Jane Austen has permeated the twenty-first-century book market thanks
to those readers-turned-writers who have adorned their own novels
with Austen’s name or with an evocation of her characters or
plots. Cecilia Salber observes that “except for certain
science fiction works, there is perhaps no other genre or author with
as many prequels, sequels, and continuations as Jane Austen”
(121). Suzanne Pucci and James Thompson concur, noting that a
successful market has arisen from a resurgence in popularity that has
been labeled “Austenmania” (1). Marjorie Garber has
coined the term “the Jane Austen syndrome” to describe
how “‘Jane Austen’ (the sum total of her language,
plots, biography, and landscape) is marketed, consumed, and
disseminated” (200). Although there are divergent
approaches to capitalizing Austen, her name has unified these
approaches into an Austen “brand.” A sample of
recent adaptations and spin-offs of her novels gets at the diversity
within the brand: a novel exploring a love affair between Jane
Austen and Mr. Darcy that transcends time, a mystery series that
stars Jane Austen as a shrewd detective, a Christian Romance series
that superimposes twenty-first-century characters onto Austen’s
plots, an innovative interpretation of Pride and Prejudice set
in a Jewish retirement community, and a novel whose plot centers on
characters reading Austen’s novels. The popularity of
these adaptations attests to readers’ need to have Austen their
way—whether through popular genres or through the
reconstruction of Austen’s life to fulfill their fantasies of
the enigmatic Austen.

Wolfgang Iser’s theoretical discussion of the inherent
imbalance between a text and a reader illuminates the impulse
reader-writers have to create new Austens or new versions of her
novels. Iser argues that a reader’s comprehension of a
text is aided by his or her ability to negotiate the “blanks,”
or gaps, in a text by making connections and closing those gaps:
blanks “are present in the text, and they denote what is absent
from the text and what must and can only be supplied by the reader’s
ideational activity” (216). Iser warns, however, that to
achieve a viable negotiation of these gaps, readers must be
“controlled in some way” (167). And yet, the new
Austen canon suggests that readers have so actively engaged Austen’s
texts that they have turned into uncontrolled reader-writers, who
have produced hundreds of texts to fill in the gaps—in both
Austen’s novels and her biography—according to their own
desires.

Throughout history, Austen has been altered, or customized, to suit
the needs of various stakeholders. According to Emily Auerbach,
the first alterations to Austen were undertaken by her family:
her biography and portrait were enhanced to make her image more
suitable to the family name and to Victorian sensibilities (17-19).
Auerbach claims that the family “had the nerve to tamper with
[Austen’s] manuscripts and add ruffles and ringlets to [her]
portrait” (4). Kathryn Sutherland asserts that, in fact,
Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, was responsible for
“beginning the process that made Jane Austen into a special
cultural commodity” (61) through the publication of his highly
Victorianized version of Austen’s life in his Memoir of Jane
Austen (1870). Auerbach’s and Sutherland’s
observations are interesting because they call to attention the ease
with which Austen has been—and can be—appropriated and
transformed according to the whims of those who would capitalize on
her name.

Many scholars, including Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald as well
as Harriet Margolis, have argued that Austen’s readers desire
to form proprietary relationships with Austen and her characters
based on their sense of nostalgia for a time they have only
experienced through fiction. Much of their research has been
directed at examining exactly what quality Austen exhibits that
continues to attract fans to her fiction and characters nearly two
centuries after her death. Macdonald and Macdonald acknowledge
that the concerns about “translation versus imitation,
problematic reader/viewer response, intertexuality, the profit
motive, and exchange-value ethics” (3) are all important issues
raised by the existence of the adaptations. Margolis asserts
that the “phenomenon of Austen adaptations . . . is
an effort to capitalize on people’s desire for a stable,
recognizable world” (23). Margolis’s assessment has
merit, but the kind of adaptations I’m concerned with usually
transcode Austen’s characters and plots into the current time.
Nostalgia seems to be an inadequate impetus for the explosion in
Austen-related fiction, especially considering that several of the
adaptations are set in America during the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, not in Regency England. In fact, Pucci and Thompson
reject nostalgia as the impetus for the “striking surge in
Austen’s cultural capital,” claiming that it is an
insufficient explanation (10).

Therefore,
an examination of current popular and consumer culture might be a
more appropriate investigation into this phenomenon, which Pucci and
Thompson argue “has crystallized at a particular moment in our
own contemporary culture” (10). These adaptations and
spin offs are not content to link themselves to Austen merely through
intertextuality (as does Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s
Diary) but seek to capitalize on Austen’s name to sell
their books: hence, Jane Austen in Boca, The Jane
Austen Book Club, and The Man Who Loved Jane Austen.
In Searching for Jane Austen, Auerbach argues, “Paradoxically,
Jane Austen nowadays seems everywhere yet still hard to find”
(3). It is not so much that Austen is encountered everywhere;
it is that so many different Austens are encountered. Allison
Thompson, who examines the fans’ consumption of Jane Austen
through the plethora of material artifacts (tee-shirts, clocks,
bumper stickers, action figures, etc.), also argues that fans have
created “very different Austens.”

In his discussion of readers’ fascination with authors, Roland
Barthes posits that to greatly esteem the “‘person’
of the author” is the “epitome and culmination of
capitalist ideology,” and that “the image of literature
. . . found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on
the author, [her] person, [her] life, [her] tastes” (143).
While Mary Ann O’Farrell agrees that popular culture has
created multiple Austens (46), she does not see Jane Austen as having
been commodified in the same way as her texts and characters have
been. She claims that there exists “an oddly bounded and
consumerist space at [the Austen market’s] center that is the
suppositious and unconsumable Jane Austen, person” (46).
But an interesting twist to the trend that Barthes discusses has
occurred through the publication of novels offering highly stylized
fictional biographies for Austen that present readers with
imaginative glimpses into the life of an elusive literary figure.

A novel
that presents an alternative biography for Austen is The Man Who
Loved Jane Austen by Sally Smith O’Rourke, which explores a
love affair between Jane Austen and a twenty-first-century,
time-traveling Mr. Darcy. Rather than culling biographical
detail from historical and primary biographical sources, The Man
Who Loved Jane Austen mines one of Austen’s most popular
novels, Pride and Prejudice. O’Rourke does not try
to emulate Austen’s narrative style, except in Jane’s
dialogue and letters to Fitz: “you must tell her she is
your dearest and loveliest desire” (291). Of course,
readers of Pride and Prejudice recognize the echo from one of
its key passages, in which Darcy has proposed to Elizabeth Bennet for
the second time (Austen 369), in O’Rourke’s saccharine
ending: “At length Darcy smiles and there were tears in
his eyes as he lowered his face to hers and whispered, ‘Dearest,
loveliest Eliza . . . ’” (291).

Though Austen’s novels can be characterized as romantic comedies, O’Rourke’s novel fits firmly within the
romance genre. The love story, except for Jane Austen’s
falling in love with one of her own characters, is not particularly
original or literary. However, the novel satisfies the
curiosity Austen fans have about Austen’s own love life.
In a blurb on the back cover of The Man Who Loved Jane Austen,
Jessica Barksdale Inclán gushes that the novel is perfect
“[f]or all of those readers who longed for Jane Austen to have
the kind of love she gave her characters—and for all those
readers who longed to have Fitzwilliam Darcy to themselves.”
Inclán implies that the readers of Austen are privileged over
historical truth and contemporary reality: they can have Austen
their way. Further, Inclán’s remark about readers’
desire to “have Fitzwilliam Darcy to themselves” suggests
ownership that the readers, not Austen, can maintain over the
character. In this way, especially given the changes to Darcy
made by O’Rourke, it appears that Darcy has been pimped as
well.

Stephanie Barron’s Jane and the Genius of the Place is
the fourth installment in the Jane Austen Mystery series and another
example of a fictionalized biography. The text, like the others
in the series, is laden with footnotes that correspond to the
“authentic” historical Austen through the use of her
letters and other biographical materials. The first-person
narrative capitalizes on Austen’s reputation for a sharp wit
and keen observation of human folly, and it mimics Austen’s
narrative voice:

Within the compass of my sight, I assure you, were any number of the
incipient scandals. The countenance of more than one gentleman
was flushed with wine and the course’s promise, or perhaps the
anxiety attendant upon heavy betting—for in the decision of a
moment, fortunes might be made or lost, reputations sacrificed, and
ruin visited upon more than merely the horse. (2)

As
delightful a read as the Austen mysteries are to the Austen fan, the
only distinguishing characteristic that sets them apart from the
plethora of novels in the mystery genre is the main character:
Jane Austen. This series does not offer a prequel, sequel, or
adaptation of any of Austen’s novels; instead it offers an
adaptation of Austen’s life that straddles two markets—the
“Austenmania” market and the mystery genre. The
positioning of Barron’s novels within two highly lucrative
markets not only ensures their commercial success but also echoes the
earliest biographies that transformed Austen’s life into a
viable product.

Like Barron, Debra White Smith writes books that are poised for
commercial success as she capitalizes on Jane Austen by appropriating
her into a popular genre, Christian romance. An adaptation of
Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Smith’s Reason
and Romance is set in the twenty-first century. In addition
to the synonymous, alliterative title linking her novel to Austen’s,
Smith includes a cast list of her characters to demonstrate their
correspondence to Austen’s characters. Despite its
classification as a Christian romance, Reason and Romance is
more overtly sexual than its counterpart:

The two of them slammed against her locked front door and Elaina
smashed her lips against his. His arms flailed. His eyes
bugged. And Ted was pulled under by a kiss that rocked the
neighborhood. He closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around
Elaina, and kissed her back with a passion long held captive.
(311)

Despite
Smith’s sexualized adaptations of Austen’s Elinor
Dashwood and Edward Ferrars, Harriet Margolis notes similarities in
the values of Smith’s and Austen’s novels. Margolis
argues that, like Austen’s heroines, romance heroines
experience a shift in identity and in their relationships to their
larger community (24). She also argues that, like Austen’s
heroines, the female protagonists of the romance genre must succeed
despite subjection to patriarchal power (24-25). And yet,
Smith’s novel does not seem to cater to nostalgic readers but
rather to those familiar with the conventions of the romance genre.

By adapting Austen into popular, formulaic genres, reader-writers of
Austen have ignored the notion that Austen should be bounded within
any single, definable literary tradition. Juliette Wells’s
assertion that this series of Christian romance novels
“demonstrate[s] Smith’s determination to appropriate what
she considers important from Austen’s fiction and to weave in
the evangelical content that her own readers expect” (7) is
indicative of the way that reader-writers consider Austen and her
works malleable to their own purposes. Deidre Lynch addresses
the tension (such as that which arises with the use of Austen’s
name to sell Christian romance novels) between critical and popular
reception of Austen’s texts and their adaptations, noting that
“the worry that Austen has been affected by the wrong sort of
popularity seems a backhanded acknowledgement of the tenuousness of
the boundaries between elite and popular culture” (8).
This kind of appropriation has a long history. John Wiltshire defends
the practice of recycling texts as “the central motor of
artistic development,” arguing that texts “only partially
belong to the original author: they are constantly being
reworked, rearranged, recycled” (3). And yet, despite the
similarities that Margolis invokes between Austen’s novels and
the contemporary Christian romance, the appropriation of Austen’s
name for commercial viability seems to be the driving force behind
the creation of Debra White Smith’s Jane Austen Series.

A quirky
adaptation by Paula Marantz Cohen is more difficult to categorize as
genre fiction than Smith’s Christian romance series.
Despite the implications of the title Jane Austen in Boca,
Jane Austen herself is not to be found in Boca Raton, Florida.
The plot of this innovative adaptation of Pride and Prejudice
revolves around three elderly Jewish women and their love interests.
Although the plot structure mostly parallels the plot of Austen’s
novel, it diverges by introducing passages in which the retirees take
a community college course about Jane Austen. Even though
Cohen’s novel does not fit neatly into a specific genre, it
does customize one of Austen’s novels for specific niche
markets. The plot’s focus on older Jewish adults living
in Florida seems to cater to the desires of older readers who want to
continue believing in the fairy-tale endings bestowed upon Austen’s
younger heroines. Salber argues that the title, Jane Austen
in Boca, resonates in the novel because Boca is the setting where
“Austen’s work is reenacted, a place where Austen’s
work is studied, and a place where Austen’s work is adapted.
Actually, Boca is timeless, Boca is everywhere” (128).
Without the name “Jane Austen” in the title, however,
readers—or at least purchasers—might find it difficult to
make the connection to the Austen “brand.”

Barthes
theorizes that the “birth of the reader must be at the cost of
the death of the Author” (148). His insight is useful for
understanding the space in which Austen can be customized:
Barthes argues that “the reader is the space on which all the
quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them
being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination” (148). Some reader-writers of Austen seem to
subscribe to Barthes’s theory, as evidenced by the number of
novels that focus on people reading Jane Austen’s novels.
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler explores the
appeal of Jane Austen. The narrator articulates the unique
connection to Austen that readers feel: “Each of us has a
private Austen” (1). The word “has” again
suggests ownership, as does the adjective “private,” as
if Austen is a material commodity. The simple statement is also
loaded with the implication not only that Austen is changed according
to individuals’ perceptions of her but that she is
simultaneously Jane Austen and a multiplicity of Jane
Austens. For example, to Jocelyn, the character responsible
for the formation of the book club, Austen is the consummate novelist
who “wrote about love and courtship, but never married”
(1). For other characters, Austen is a “comic genius”
(1) or a “daughter, a sister, an aunt,” but a pragmatist
all the same (2). For the young lesbian in the group, Austen
belongs in the horror section (3); the only male in the group is the
sole member whose Austen is, at least initially, impossible to
discern. Of course, these readers view Austen through the
lenses of their own experiences, creating a kaleidoscope through the
sum of their little bits of Austen.

The
repeated use of Jane Austen’s name has created a globally
recognized franchise in which reader-writers, readers, and publishers
are the three major stakeholders. In a consideration of the
effect of internet culture, Kate Bowles recognizes the apparent
abandonment with which a new generation of authors has taken
ownership over everything Austen. She argues that “Austen
has not been so much commercialized as floated, and the multiple
shareholders of Austen, Inc. are engaged in a substantial
restructuring” (16). This restructuring has resulted in
the creation of a Jane Austen brand. And just as Pimp My
Ride subsumes the customization of many different models of cars
into one recognizable brand, now Austen scholars and enthusiasts must
concede that there is an identity that—Pimp My Austen!—subsumes
all of the divergent customizations and genre-fications into
the Jane Austen brand. Surely, Jane Austen has been pimped.

Barron, Stephanie. Jane and the Genius of the Place: Being
the Fourth Jane Austen Mystery. New York: Bantam, 1999.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.”
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed.
David Lodge and Nigel Wood. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2000.
146-50.

Bowles, Kate. “Commodifying Austen: The Janeite Culture
of the Internet and Commercialization through Product and Television
Series Spinoffs.” Jane Austen on Screen. Ed. Gina
Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003.
15-21.